The treatment of divergent viewpoints in global environmental assessments

Global environmental assessment (GEA) processes routinely deal with a wide range of divergent viewpoints. The entanglement of disputed facts and values within these viewpoints raises challenges for their legitimate treatment, particularly in solution-oriented GEAs. We offer a conceptualization of ‘divergent viewpoints’ in GEA processes covering both scientific and the political (normative) dimensions, focusing on actors’ framing of environmental policy problems or on the suitability of particular response options. Based on extensive empirical research on three selected GEAs and a literature review, we distil nine general approaches which have been employed to respond to divergent viewpoints, and present these in terms of simplified, ideal-type strategies. We furthermore generate hypotheses about the advantages and drawbacks of each approach as well as conditions for success. Our analysis suggests that for policy-relevant divergent viewpoints highly disputed both on normative and scientific grounds, collaboratively exploring the practical implications of policy alternatives through GEAs is a particularly promising approach, although practical challenges remain. More broadly, this article contributes to a better understanding and more explicit discussion of existing, often implicit approaches within GEA processes for responding to divergent viewpoints. This article is part of a special issue on solution-oriented GEAs.